A Friendly Response to “A Reluctant ARP Pastor's Take on Synod” - Andy Webb

(Note to Readers: authors who do not send a pic get my favorite pic of them as the pic for the article. Love you Andy)

 Dear James, 

I wanted to thank you for speaking so honestly in your recent letter/essay in Seventeen82 and although I am on the other side of the female deacon issue, I wanted to offer some reasons why I wasn’t discouraged by the recent Synod and why I don’t think you necessarily should be either.

Let me begin by confessing that I too was once something of a reluctant presbyter. While I enjoyed most session meetings, for several years I found myself dreading going to presbytery meetings and absolutely hated going to the PCA General Assembly, which I found to be immensely discouraging year after year. One year I actually asked my session if I could give it a miss entirely, and they wisely answered, “No.” As a result,from the time I was first ordained as a Ruling Elder in 1997 till my departure from the PCA in 2020, I believe I only missed one Assembly,which was canceled because of Covid-19 and one that I was too sick to attend. So, if you will, please allow me to dip into my prior experience tohighlight some of the things that made the PCA GA discouraging that I do not find in the ARP Synod. 

Some of the most obvious were the cost and location of the PCA GA. The GA was always changing location every year and instead of seeking out relatively inexpensive locations, they were usually held in very expensive convention centers in major cities. The pastors and ruling elders who attended would usually have to buy plane tickets and then book hotel rooms. They also had to pay to eat at restaurants, which made the whole experience very expensive. In fact, it was often too expensive for many small church pastors and rural elders to attend at all. As a result, having our Synod meet year after year at Bonclarken (except for the Covid years) is a great blessing to me and I am glad to see that many of the ARP pastors and elders who wouldn’t be able to attend a convention center meeting in a big city are able to attend on a regular basis. Although we may not recognize it, this helps to stop the big metropolitan churches from having the kind of overinfluence they have traditionally had in the PCA. 

Another great advantage that the ARP General Synod has over the PCA General Assembly is the lack of parties and an obvious political division within the Synod. Yes, there was division at the recent Synod over the issue of female deacons, but that was a divide created by the theological beliefs of individual presbyters and their congregations over a single issue and is totally different from the entrenched partisanship and party spirit I experienced for years on the floor of the General Assembly. By God’s grace, the ARP does not have a “National Partnership” or a “Gospel Reformation Network.” She does not have established groups dedicated to advancing a particular agenda which includes multiple fundamental changes. One of the many reasons our congregation joined the ARP was that we recognized there was no group in the ARP that wanted to see Side B Gay (but celibate) Christianity established as a viable option for members and officers and while the ARP did not have a group of men desperately fighting to hold to the teachings of the Westminster Standards, this was because she did not need to. 

Then, there was the importance of the issues that were being actively fought over at PCA General Assemblies. While the discussion of the topic of female deacons was important and contentious, I think we all acknowledge that it is a secondary issue. Also, these kinds of issuesseldom come up at Synod. We may have urgent business with potentially grave consequences, such as the near collapse of the pension fund or the desire to put Erskine on a sounder theological and financial heading; but we do not fight every year over issues like creation, women preaching, justification by faith alone, the mode and meaning of the sacraments or whether men who identify as gay in major Christian magazines should continue in the ministry and I am extremely thankful to God that we do not.

Now if I may, let me touch on the way the debate over deaconesses progressed at the Synod. I too will admit that I was grieved by some of the language that was used and that on occasion the discussion veered from debating the issue to debating why the men on both sides held to their beliefs. I was also disturbed by the use of scare tactics. While consequences of following one course or another can be considered, consequences alone must never trump the clear teaching of the Bible. May we never forget that we are descended from ministers and congregations that were willing to risk their lives meeting for worship on soggy Scottish moors in defiance of the law of the land because they refused to compromise their confession of faith and declare that King Charles II was the head of the church in the United Kingdom.  

But at the same time, it was refreshing to see that men were willing to stand up and say what they believed and debate in a way that was completely transparent. Far too often in debates in the PCA I have heard men say things I know were not in keeping with their beliefs. Just as an example, during the creation debate, I heard a well-known presbyter argue for accepting 5 views of creation by saying, “Now none of us is in favor of theistic evolution,” when it was later revealed that Biologos, an organization explicitly dedicated to advancing belief in theistic evolution among evangelicals, was meeting at his church headquarters.

If there is one area where I would say the PCA seems to do a little betterthan we do it is in not “othering” fellow presbyters. The PCA, not being as ethnically Scottish or tied to certain founding families, was always made up of men who came from a variety of denominational and ethnic backgrounds. Regardless of whether your background was OPC, RPCES, EPC, PCUSA, Dutch Reformed or even Baptist, you were considered part of the family. No one was a hyphenated presbyter thought of as OPC-PCA or EPC-PCA. I have to admit that while I have found the ARP to be tremendously welcoming, there are times when I have felt slightly like an in-law rather than a family member and to put it frankly, no one wants to feel like Carlo Rizzi at the Corleone family dinner table - tolerated, but not really “one of us.” So, I felt distinctly uneasy when I read the accusation that some ARP ministers might have been guilty of dissimulation when they joined the denomination. Personally, I made my views regarding female deacons known to my Presbytery, and I have no reason to believethat other men who have joined the ARP rather than being raised in it did not do the same. I would add though that I have often encountered men who have been ARP for decades who do not agree with our Standards regarding issues like the Sabbath or Images of Christ. I have no reason to believe that they lied about that when they were ordained, even though I might ask, “Did you not know what our Standards have said about the Sabbath since they were first drawn up in the 1640s when you joined the ARP?” 

There is a related line of reasoning that I find misguided, which is to argue that we do not want to create the kind of denomination where someone like B.B. Warfield could not be a member. When we do that, we forget that the change to ordaining female deacons in the 1970s created a denomination in which the forebears of the ARP, men like the Erskinesand Thomas Boston, likely could not have been members either as they did not believe that office was open to women. Our polity should come from what we believe the Bible teaches, not what individual theologians, no matter how famous they were, believed.

Brother, lest I go on for too long, let me point out some things about the Synod that should probably make you happy rather than discouraged.

The first was that while the debate over women deacons went on for quite a time, it was an important issue that required serious deliberation, and that once that issue was out of the way the Synod actually proceeded at warp speed and finished a day early. This was a major improvement over many of the Assemblies I attended that dragged on to the last possible moment and then ended without actually getting to all the business.

The second was that while the floor vote showed that the Synod is almost evenly divided over the question of whether women should be ordained to the office of deacon, there was clearly no possibility of reaching the required 2/3rds supermajority necessary to change the ARP Form of Government on this issue. It is also highly doubtful that such a supermajority might be reached in anything less than a decade. So even if the discussion of the issue was highly distressing to those who want to continue ordaining women to the office of deacon, it is unlikely that it will come up again in the near future, and even if it does, it is even more unlikely that any change will occur.

The third was that we agreed to produce a study paper defining our view on the office of deacon. Such a paper is much needed, if only because any reasonable assessment of the modern American church would conclude that the office of deacon is much misunderstood and underappreciated. We also need to remember that when the original decision to move to ordaining women to the office of deacon was made in the 1970s, it was as a result of the general egalitarianism that was overwhelming most Presbyterian denominations at the time. This is highlighted by the fact that it was quickly followed by an attempt to also change the Form of Government to include women elders. As a Jus Divinum denomination,we need to demonstrate that our beliefs are founded on the Bible, so a well-argued exegetical defense that shows why the New Testament church might have had female deacons in the 1 Timothy 3 sense and not just a separate “widows list” office based on 1 Timothy 5 needs to be made. I for one would welcome such a report so that I can at least offer it to others who claim our practice is merely a vestige of earlier liberalism rather than the result of sound theological deliberation.

In closing, I thank you for the irenic tone of your closing paragraphs, and want you to know that I also love my brothers in the ARP regardless of their stand on this subject. My time in my own particular presbytery has been like finding an oasis after a long period of wandering in the desert and I am grateful for all the men of Grace presbytery. I look forward to laboring with you as we together struggle to advance the Kingdom of God and together stand firm in this evil day.

With that in mind, let me close, therefore with Paul’s exhortation; knowing that it was made to us as a united army and not simply as individuals:

Ephesians 6:13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

14 Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness,

15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace;

16 above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one.

17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God;

18 praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints --

19 and for me, that utterance may be given to me, that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel,